Atlassian Crowd experiences?

Question

we (a team of about 150) are considering moving our ALM solution from Bugzilla/CVS to Jira/svn/Confluence/Bamboo/Fisheye. SO has a lot of good info on those, but I would be interested to learn about another tool from Atlassian - a Single Sign On (SSO) Crowd, I am considering adding it to the mix for an LDAP integration with our Novell id's.

• has someone had any experience with Crowd?
• how does it handle 100/200/500 (after recession, that is) users?
• any tips/tricks?
• would you choose different, open source SSO solutions?

thanks

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EDIT: a year has passed...

We got Crowd and went with ActiveDirecotry integration along with internal Crowd directory (for short-term contractors, etc.). So far the solution works just great.

Answer 1

We recently analyzed a bunch of tools, among which Jira and friends were an option

we are leaning towards Polarion, as it seems to be a more integrated solution end to end, whereas Jira is more of a basic "issue tracking system"

We had a demo yesterday, and the guy said some client uses it with 3,000+ users around the world

Answer 2

I haven't had experience with Crowd on such a large set of users as yours, but I did find it very easy to set up and manage our JIRA, Confluence and SVN instances with Crowd (we only have 25 users). It will handle Apache authentication as well, so I'm planning to switch our various authenticated Web sites to Crowd as well.

According to Atlassian's site, Crowd should easily be able to handle 500 users; there are some useful case studies and Webinar recordings on the site that will tell you more.

Answer 3

We're using Crowd with about 80 users and expect that number to climb into the hundred when we roll it out for client access. Crowd is important to us because it allows us to integrate Jira and Confluence (the Atlassian wiki) with SSO, which is critical.

Crowd works well for us but it does have some quirks. We are using it to draw authentications from Active Directory. There are some things that are a little inelegant. We need to do some more digging to troubleshoot those.

But that aside, Crowd is a big win for us, for these two reasons:

1) SSO across Atlassian apps 2) Ability to have our internal users drawn from Active Directory, and add clients directly to Crowd and not bog down AD

We're very happy with all the Atlassian tools.

Answer 4

Hi,

Major disclosure: I'm the Crowd Product Manager. So, apply as much NaCl as you think wise.

I'd be very surprised if you had any issues with 500 users. Especially since Novell seems to be one of the better directory servers in terms of performance. The only time I'd expect to see problems is if your Crowd server and Novell directory server are on opposite sides of the world. Don't do that unless you have to :-)

We have plenty of users connecting thousands of users to JIRA, Confluence, and the Dev Tools with Crowd.

Any issues - drop us a line ([email protected] or http://support.atlassian.com) and we'll help out.

Cheers, Dave.

ps: I hope that didn't come off as a sales pitch or "we make magic products that are perfect in every possible way, now give us your money!"